When people turn their car engines on five minutes before driving anywhere 'to get it warmed up'. It will heat up quicker if the engine is doing more than just idling.
Not doable in some climates, or at the very least too dangerous to human life to drive a vehicle with ice on the windshield. Imagine the cost of emergency crews helping thousands of accident victims every day in every locality.
Just the fact that so many countries are willing to do this, says something about the fact that we all know that we're killing the planet and using up all her resources
Would those be the same countries that only last week called upon OPEC to increase the oil production to decrease the prices of gasoline? The same countries throw money at the likes of Ford Motors and GM to keep their factories going, while at the same time public transport in many North American cities is underfunded and only somewhat functional. That's if you're lucky to live in a city where there is usable public transportation.
I never heard of this until today, but it made me think of some very simple things that I can do to contribute more, without any real effort on my part.
See, this is where the problem is - "easy". It ain't easy. A flip of the switch once a year for one hour won't solve anything, and it won't even contribute anything significant to the reduction of pollution and greenhouse gases. Real solutions result from real work/sacrifices. Why don't you change all your bulbs to compact fluorescent ones. If you have 10 of them, then this will save way more than turning twenty 60W bulbs for one hour 365 days a year.
The irony though is that, in Ontario, they asked people to do just that, and they even offered coupons and various little incentives (no tax on energy efficient appliances, programmable thermostats etc) and then... they started considering increase the price of electricity because the usage went down so much that the energy generation fetched less money than they were used to :)
Another irony is the utterly idiotic ethanol fad. In the US the ethanol producing crops used up 12% of farm land and that replaced 1% of regular gasoline. If all farmers produced only the crops used for the ethanol production then less than 9% of crude oil would be replaced. Food prices would be so hight that most people would simply die of hunger. Hmmmm, come to think about it... less people=less energy used... yeah, ethanol is the way to go ;)
For example some folks may not know that leaving appliances plugged in while not used, still pull energy (toasters, cell phone chargers, etc.).
Some do some don't.
Apparently its also safer to unplug unused appliances as well as saving energy.
Some appliance do not keep settings unless they are connected to a power source such as some phones, answering machines, TVs etc.
Also, most equipment failures occur when they are being turned on. The surges of electrical current is what does it. With computers, I always recommend keeping them on the whole day. That's what I do at home with most of my 10 computers, and in the last 15 years I had not a single power supply failure. In a library where they turn the machines off every evening we had 7 PS failures for 2006, 6 for 2007 (20 machines).
There are ways to reduce the usage of energy, but those once a year events are not it.
aha,dont you have a different type of wiring thingy over there too?
Wiring is basically the same. There is a ground prong (wire) in all electrical outlets/switches and that is regulated by electrical and building codes. A big grounding wire coming out of the circuit breaker box is connected to a metal element of the building's plumbing system.
Strangely, one thing absent here are lightning rods - an American invention.
